Although it may have seemed otherwise to many Americans, the crisis in Kosovo had not developed overnight. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia were over and had dropped off the evening news, and now Milošević seemed to be up to his old ethnic-cleansing tricks in this place called Kosovo. A war in Kosovo had been incubating for a long time; its sudden emergence onto the front pages paralleled a last-ditch effort by the international community to bring under control a conflict that even senior policy makers did not understand much better than my students and I did, although close observers of the region had foreseen an escalating conflict there for some time.

The violence in Kosovo developed gradually; it was not a matter of a large guerrilla army taking to the field on the Albanian side, or of the VJ (the Yugoslav army) springing into a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. What happened instead is that the Serbian police were aggressive in enforcing Milošević's apartheid regime in Kosovo even as other parts of Eastern Europe were breaking free of totalitarian Communist rule, and other parts of Yugoslavia were fighting to set up their own states. The voices in the Kosovar Albanian community favoring separation from Serbia grew louder. As they did so, the police tried to arrest them. Often the Serbian authorities did not know who the separatists were, or if they did know the identities, they did not know their locations, so the police began to target friends and neighbors instead.